I find You, finding me: Your undiluted Compassion
is no imagined strength.
in the stillness…
Tag: Peace
Supernatural emotions
be arrested.
as a weaned child, rest your head on the beach between this & the eternal. measure how deep we go…
back to when we saw our first sun rise, a mother smile, a father breathe his last breath.
where does sadness exit, or soul. or my child’s tears when I touch him, or an old man’s tears, & a beggar’s invisibility:
am startled at What stares back; i got used to war,
Pic- Karsten Winegeart, unsplash
not this. this opposes black&white lines. This breathes between the lies. A Wound that heals. A piece of healing spit in my eye, a bloodied whisper in my riot: forgive. Forgive. Let go. Forget. Breathe. Exhale. Inhale. Be loved. Live, live, not carcasses in the wind –
but arrested by Rest. the greatest temptation is to stay unwanted, unloved. Ay, am staring hangjaw at sacred choreography, “… walk on water? Nay, dance, dance…”
Gopalpur on sea, East Coast India; searching for childhood footprints; change can be beautiful. pic taken by my sis Doc Li, 2023
Bookie!
Thank you D’verse for provoking Prompt : Place & Space
Last week a local Book Store took me back to the first library I ever met. Dad insisted it wasn’t haunted, the local Doc said it was! I was five and deeply interested in everything, esp the smoking lady ghost they said visited the Bungalow’s oval mirror, next door.
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We were on an island where Dad worked. The Inspection Bungalow was a tiled few rooms with green faded windows, and attached library that cooed with pigeons in its shutters. Here I met the aroma of old pages running with silvery book worm.
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Most Sunday afternoons we visited the Library where dad got his PG Wodehouse & Perry Mason. Later in the noon he’d joyfully run us thru’ something new Jeeves just said. Ma would find her stash of back dated Good housekeeping magazines, and Georgette Heyer. She was this romantic, and loved reading out bits to me between blushes. She and dad were childhood sweethearts – still hopelessly in love with life, with the island we were on, with dangerous river crossings, with people of all types…..places, and oh books, even if it was the telephone directory:
books made one exist on a plateau with a globe full of footprints, heart prints..it made us a brotherhood of individuals getting to know one another. It was a priceless place, free of territorial rights and assoc wars ;
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later she unearthed “More than conquerors“ a novel off Romans 8:37, that steeled the way I looked at weakness: physical/emotional.
Yea, the Library, outdated as it is now?- will always resurrect that part of me that dares shadows and ghosts that boo. It tickles the ribs of shutters I create now and then and let’s me into the aroma of buried pages.
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Thank you D’verse for this Prompt Place & Space.
Meanwhile what I found in Blossom Book store here 😅
Tucked away in a shadow, 👆🏼 found this beauty (I have an older Ed., gifted to me by a visiting Belgian artist who lived in an underpass in Mumbai). She & husband had left home to be here in India and help the poor, the best they could. They later adopted twin girls from Kerala. Yeah, all this takes me back to roots that grow our pages, ya.
Airpoet Sunset (love that typo:)
My pics don’t half capture what we saw two evenings ago at our Kempegowda sky. With zero city silhouettes, no trees, just this blaze of light we’ve all seen before, but this one ruled!
It had been a long day, we were hoping for a spot of coffee & chat. But time runs: you don’t get to ask an airline to wait. ( The last Noel &I did that we kept AirIndia waiting a good five+ minutes; am not telling that story right now😧, they were polite and furious).
But heaven knows.
Heaven knows when a woman is about to have a meltdown. They know. My Noel is Mr. Tenderheart but practical. I’m saying “lookat that sunset“, he’s looking at Time. Where park this. How get to point B.
I’m thinking, does the guy love me? He’s sighing and grabbing steering wheel with eyes like a scared reindeer. Scared I’ll go do my thing. And ‘thing’ is my poetic self wanting to lie in the road and look at the sky. What he’d do is first check if that space is clean/ safe/legally clear…all that. Ofcourse. Is what great husbands do;
im just saying heaven knows how to sort us. They filled the skies with gold painted words I am learning to read.
At home last night we talked of how the skies are our keepers, how they shock us into their Point of View. At our Contrasts.
Have you had a very hot day, and got in the rain? And how that fell in your face like kisses from heaven; haven’t you too been hugged by an old person; they looked like your parent did, and you felt a piece of the Eternal holding you? Haven’t you too at least once, been smiled at by a total stranger at a bus stop, and felt the urge to smile back and it was indescribable friendship, random yea, but an ode to the Visible Unseen?
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
— Albert Einstein
So I experienced renewed friendship with the sun : twas a glorious Stranger smiling at us, at a rushed Port, where there’s that thin fine line between here & eternity, between Time zones, latitudes, clouds, beneath / above. There are safety checks, safety measures. Waiting lounge. Departure, Arrival. Life in Transit. It is all of us, seen as with Bird’s eye. Everything suddenly miniscule. A paradigm shift of reference. One gets to congregate with all that blue. All that expanse. Acres of the heavens. Turbo speed is the closest we come to that kind of mileage. But deep within, we soar higher than we admit.
The nations are as a drop in the bucket, my Scriptures read. What is man …?the first Astronaut on moon quoted from the Psalms. I was a child, now am grown and the more I stare at life, the more am startled by beauty, by pain, by comfort and chaos, and by the rain that falls equally on us all, like the untouchable Light, the way It pulses at emotions, reaching in the iris of human fatigue, esp at dusk.
"Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren't you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind - to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity." A.Einstein
Super Power (tears for Peace)
I’ve received hate, evil, disaster, discrimination, cruelty
but with Compassion … one is startled into a new order of things.
Call it Love, Grace, unmerited favor.… It breaks me out of old mental patterns into New.
It ruins Ruins, breathing Life into Carcasses of Joy.
Compassion weeps Fire in the ashes of our tears for Peace… Yea
we’ve eaten at Banquets of Hate but one tiny morsel of true Love, startles us forever
into a Dimension that can pull us out of traditional puppetry..
Can a tiny molecule of Care provoke Change ?
She was at least six months pregnant; her other child seen here, looked up at us with vacant eyes. The woman’s pale face brightened; in minutes every container of food we gave them was ripped open as they ate till their wrists were messy. I couldn’t sleep that night. The first time we saw this family living under a cart in a back lane at Shvaji nagar(busy market area locally), we gave them some food and money. It all seemed too little help for their cracked lips and skins shiny with too many hours in our Indian winter sun.
The next morning we contacted a renowned NGO that was willing to take them in, provided we got local police clearance, which we were willing to get for them. Five mins later, the NGO called to say, “We will get the family in our van ourselves.Legal clearance shouldn’t be a problem. There’s work, food, shelter, provided they are willing.”
Oh. Thoroughly happy with all this, we went back to family under cart in that back lane, with news of help. Their kid could get a life, the young mom could get maternity assistance, her husband – a job. All this with a legal nod. But uh uh. The man looked eager for what was being offered: he worked where he could – cleaning floors, sweeping the street early mornings, but the woman turned into steel. “We are fine.”
“Aren’t you scared of being in the open here, day and night? And in your condition? “
Her yellow eyes flattened. “No.” She said. Gone was the gaunt lost look. The woman looked formidable, a street creature with lower lip sass & arm on hip. We haggled over their safety and future;
their child crawled back under rusting cart which wasn’t theirs. The man gave me a sad smile, as his wife stuck her jaw out. “You don’t want help?” I asked, now embarrassed.
Another young man with them(you see his hand in the photograph), said, “Help.” Then he furthered that with asking for help for himself. Every time I spoke to this couple, the woman muttered at me, the husband looked sadder, and the neighbour asked help for himself.
He almost got to me, before a flower seller and another approached us with severe disapproval, (as the couple + kid disappeared).
“This boy is a local thief, he is mentally ill and will harass you all. “
The local “thief” was breaking my heart by now. Kitsy our daughter bought flowers from the vendor, beetroot for her dad’s salad (after Angioplasty, we are all eating better, every day is a beautiful reminder of miracles, all that…till we got here, to ShivajiMarket, for better veggies).
No, the NGO couldn’t place the boy- local authorities would need to clear him, they said in a quick text. How old was he, 20? His face was a mess of fear, desperation and aloneness. Grandma was all he had; he suffered from fits and was possibly a kleptomaniac. No, the NGO could not help him; this was a legal issue and I was advised to get home. We gave the boy some food and pocket money; his desperation seared thru me, as we got in an auto- rick back home.
Helpless-ness. What a word. What a world. All the need in me to help him didn’t seem to help. The flower & vegetable seller who knew this boy, kind of took care of him. They had even heard of the NGO that was willing to help the family (who disappeared as we spoke).
A strange kind of rejection this was turning into. Flower seller heard me out, and shook his head. “Who gets help like this?” He asked as he handed us a bouquet of lavender asters wrapped in newspaper. “….who refuses work these days? And who are you?”
Who was I ? With an unintelligible reply we had headed home after wading through street food and sellers of scarves, bright kurtas, junk jewelry, cane garden furniture and gaudy green guavas cut in with red chilly and salt.
The world is a strange place: the older I get the more I see it as a Union of Acceptance or Rejection – even from the most unlikely quarters. One sees the strangest Collabs of Innocence & Crime.
That young “thief” had the most innocent eyes I’ve seen in a bit. Local neighbors called him a chronic crook, oh not to be trusted anyplace. But – what if he had a base that could help him? “Help“, he’d said.
I don’t know.
Back home, we are not very strong ourselves, except deep within where I grow my vineyard of Prayer. Here one eats the salt of tears, of sensitivities sharpening by rejection, even from the most fragile sections of our society. Where have we gone wrong, so wrong that Independence is now settling in with lack of social security?
Oh the stories our lanes and lies tell. Some tell me there’s no use just praying. But every single time I meet my Maker, there’s a new face calling from yet another back lane. And they may run away from any kind of assistance; hmm, look it is scary to trust strangers,
and again,
can a tiny Molecule of Care provoke Change?
Maybe, yes. Even in our self.
i prayed for a prayer
burn my lips with verbs that do nothing but peace Abba.
Fire dance
WordPress Daily Prompt: have you ever performed on stage or given a speech
Yes, I have performed even my Tefillah* on stage & ones in streets & inside my teeth.
Ma would weep.
For me praying used to be racing sandslopes to where the sun was still in grey waters waiting to give me gold:
a gold that took everything,
It still seeps my tides of Will & Time: a refining Fire mill.
Later I saw grown ups pray / rocking at walls, then walk away; but do watch when a Prayerer sways: each sway is a flame that is given away, not necessarily warming only the Prayerer.
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Yeah though shhhhlisten I have the deadliest condition : unanswered prayers. These mutate at Change;
I do not wait for You, God, for togetherness’ sake, my Asking only dictates!
Forgive me, Abba
I’m returning, racing to where You wait, like the silence of the sun, unchanged.
I’ve seen too much to dismiss the Dawn that brought me here: my best Tefillah is yet to be
where Abba burns the dark to dance with me,
in the firemill that changes the Asker.
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*Tefillah : Hebrew. Outpour of heart, in Presence of the Almighty.
Christmas Cactus
You remind me of how steep we bear each other,
inter -species.
I responded to a Skeptic not realizing this was going to be more than sweet poetry shares…
Poetry partnerships are responses to each other’s poem.
I hadn’t a clue that the articulate, kind eyed Skeptic’s Kaddish was agreeing to many extra miles just to be seen with my Yeshua verses.
In his Post David Bogomolny says,” Yes, I responded to Faith Poetry.”
“…I mean, really, one of the main reasons I avoid such poetry is because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. What would be the point of responding to a true believer’s sincere God-loving poem with my skepticism? What would my cynical response accomplish? And- believe me, I have almost nothing left in me today but cynicism…” David Bogomolny, Skeptic’s Kaddish – ben Alexander David.
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I’m a ‘Faith Poet’? Now I know, thank you David. Love the description.
‘He didn’t want to hurt me’ … ben A.D. Ah’m. You don’t see my cactus heart – I’d have been the original doubting Thomas’ daughter had it not been for What we been staring thru’ the dark at !
David writes with skilled ease and forms I never knew existed. Like it or not, this impatience at “faith”, coupled with careful toeing of thin line between here and the Shekinah, is fascinating; his Kaddish of grief, at loss of his father, the renowned Israeli American Mathematician +, Alexander Bogomolny is a Prayer Wall all by Itself. These are lyrics of beauty in ashes. It stirred me to look closer at scepticism. After months I was blogging again and two passages from his Skeptic’s Kaddish ran at me; both are necessary to Everything.
“Papa…in describing you …I have sometimes invoked an image of you as the “genius version of Forrest Gump” because you lived through so much momentous history but remained unruffled by it. You innocently savored life’s little details and exhibited a childlike fascination for moments that went unnoticed by most. It seems to me that your life experiences were filtered through your soul before ever reaching your mind.“
His other line : “… it feels to me as though nobody has any interest in listening to those with whom they disagree politically …..”
Two random readings from a professing skeptic, and neither felt hostile to a Bible hugging momma (me);
so. We did a couple of back and forth Poetry shares. One cannot presume to know another’s journey;
as for me, it wasn’t my Ma’s insistence nor Dad’s that provoked me to stare in the Unseen. Left to myself I’d’ve been the Skeptic of skeptics, you’ve no idea. I didn’t find heaven in the pews and baptism pool till a certain clearing of my mind began. The Unseen was right there beneath my own skin and the veins of leaves, of Life;
like a Poem in our mind that becomes a written word, I stared in the dark: this is how the Unseen world works for me, this is my definition of Faith. “ ..so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” Hebrews 11.
I find God staring at my own narrow ways through other humans who can forgive one another too. Love like that hurts like little else can. And it wrecks me to pieces, in a Peace that defies defect. Nothing missing, nothing broken – Shalom. Peace.
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Our local Sati, Dowry deaths to mention a few, had begun to build me into a museum of crime records. It is not impossible to go there. I could not forgive that everyday there’s a grisly rape, an honour killing, there’s war & sins of the powerful / ‘righteous’. One summer holiday between Anne Frank and Jungle Book, I came across Corrie Ten Boom’s Hiding Place:
the power of Forgiveness mingled with Love that asks nothing in return but a certain giving: this is an act of Soul. Without which we are….what? And if we do have Soul, we are miles more than meets the eye. Sigh. Yes!
Then we could not limit our self anymore nor stay indifferent to evidences of Life beneath surfaces. Maybe we would begin to listen to each other, know why we are what we are. We are more than a few dimensions. We are minefields and diamonds that surface from generations of bruises we carry like tattoos in our skin, and stars we seek.
Sheer relief : I didn’t have to play God anymore. I gave up my panel of Controls. One could swing a hammock in a desert if you could find two good trees! There would be dust storms, there would be songs. And there could be nothing missing, nothing broken inside-out if you dared. It would be tiring. Uneasy. No blame games. Only Grace.
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I am grateful for people who believe what they believe with an honesty that is unafraid to look at the Unseen. People like David who is a true ….Tolerant?
May you be startled.
You deserve the best.
Outgrowing hurt
That moment you’re aware you’re being watched
…that He is aware of you.
He knows you by name. There is nothing that can shake away that moment. The Creator creates it, designer made for you. You look up to see Him gazing down at you.
There’s no need of the sun, there’s nothing under the earth. Everything you knew pales in the Presence of This Presence that overwhelms all else. You are aware that He is aware of you. You are loved, regarded with Eyes that know things we humans can only try imagine.
“What can separate us from love like that?”
adapted. Bible.
As June comes to an end, we are officially past mid 2022. May we know how deeply the Father loves us that He gave His son to take our stripes. We believe in everything else but the most beautiful story of Love. Why. Why not.
We cannot see Him, nor satan, yet both are incredibly palpable in our lives. We get to choose whom we serve, the Tormentor or our Beloved. I guess all of this will best come to light that moment we pass through the veil between life and death
Till then, what am I most aware of ; what grabs my heart and soul. In the secret place of the night mist or early dawn, who am I, whose am I.
SEAHORSE, my friend
He was real, I was young enough to love him for what he was, a real sea creature in the early waves, Bay of Bengal. Through the years, he has followed me, city after city, lane after lane, along with a certain “Harrison” Aussy Life Saver/priest who took me to the Shoulder of a wave. The two become one in a world of creative fiction, where the real story is one about Trusting the One Whose Shoulder we may lean on with the heart of a child. Do check preview attached👇🏼
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx34iC8LUFTwW5neG50OzJ-4jN7iSFBwvF
Dew Fall
…on our blinds, our mind – shuttered.
on our veils, our vales of shadows –
sparkle our dust with the Life of Your Light,
Fall, Dew, fall.
Heal
when we do, we will be changed,
These days there are no words enough. We will heal when we heal;
we will die and birth either hate or more love:
the kind that is conceived in days like these when our children kill our children. What state is that?
Words fail. We sit in the grass that bears our babies – these are days of a state we never knew; days we blame God not hell; days we turn away from the Forgiver, to the Taunter of humans.
Father forgive us. Father, heal.
‘The Cokeville Miracle’
True life stories have a way of leaving you staring as movie credits scroll down your Living room:
after you get a glass of cool water, you re- live some of the scenes you just watched, then get back in current reality, a little re- arranged. This Movie had that effect on me/ us. I forgot to have a coffee;
👆🏼 90+ kids prayed, as terror unleashed around them, and then the 3rd dimension breaks loose, really?
Why isn’t this taught in our textbooks? Why are we systematically worried about stepping on anothers’ cultural toes, for tipping each other off on the greatest Essential ever – the presence of Heaven right in our personal hells?! Why is the God a ‘boring old man’ & better substituted by Red caped Santa, when the Real Deal is by far the very thing our wildest dreams scream for?
Strange things happen when we pray. “It doesn’t change things always, it changes us for things.” Famous Quote – they knew what they were saying. Yea strange things….
“miracles” : not just shopping lists ticked off by a celestial Arm, but soul details refurbished, “inners” thwacked back into breath.
If you’ve lived enough like I have, if you’ve watched your blind son dance in the rain (he’s got the whackiest moves😀), if you’ve watched him heal from seizures only to be impacted by Meds’ side effects in ways I’d rather not enlist here- zero assistance from more Meds, and dear Docs wondering whether we are training him alright or not, for now he manifests personality issues,
but then he is, steadily better, I’m saying “steadily”, cuz yesterday was a bad day. Pardon my short forms and zero editing skills. I blog best on the run, its a Mom- human hehe; a daughter of a Father Who hears my Prayers. I deliver them 9-5, a rant, a Psalm- a song on the hinges of Faith!
For there are days of zero strength, of numb disbelief, trauma, shock. Days I wonder why everyone is mad in the newspapers, why is life political…
and then there are the Miracles, they start like a small fire somewhere in the midriff, in the back of my tongue, a taste of a certain sweetness unimagined-
it is the start up of miracles. It beats what could happen if all were well with everyone, I mean factually, physically. In the presence of a not so cool moment, a sudden wellspring of joy, is not an imagined App, trust me, it is the Fact of the Act of Prayer. He does it every single time. Every single time.
The Boy With No Name
Happened in a few minutes, this one’s script, but the Time lapse + putting together, ah’m!
For actual kids and those with heart for the Unseen. Watch time – 9 mins., and special sound delivery 👉🏼 “Appey- man*” (line loan, Johann😀)
*fruit seller ‘Apple’
“No, blood does not matter anymore”
We have had tea together a thousand times in these cane chairs facing her curry leaf tree and windows hung with old silk curtains.
Sia is a good woman with friends and folks who love her; why wouldn’t they, she is not just strikingly entertaining, she is one of the loveliest persons I have ever met. Dark long classic almond eyes in a determined oval shaped face set in wheat gold skin you want to paint! ( I’ve tried painting Sia and will try again; she is a hundred stories and I must wait to capture all their colours, oh she’s generous with comment and has booked a canvas from my battered easel). I was saying though, beneath that nice surface is soft steel, easier to break than I suspected possible.
“I should not insist on being loved by my only sibling, but uhm, who said blood is thicker than anything else? It is a liquid and it can dry up like a forgotten river.”
Sia talks that way between better days, so I’m not all surprised, and yet today the moment simmers like her eyes: they brim with aloneness.
“One should know they are not needed or loved anymore, but I still hang on, I follow my sister, I wait for her to come home, I remember our childhood too much, now…it changes? Because...?”
I have not one nice warm thing to say. Her gold lemon tea with mint leaf waits in white ceramic; I cannot breathe, her hurt has to ebb. It doesn’t.
“..is alright,” she continues as if she heard me. “Let’s have that mint from my herbal pot, hehe!”
Just when I was settling into her sorrow she turns into the rising sun.
“You know, Ray. I do not feel bitter anymore?! They do not want me, that is fine. We fight for those we need to keep. Once that is not there anymore, what is the fight? How is the painting coming up?“
“What painting?!” I ask without thinking and her face blows up in laughter. Without warning, Sia Mayben is a skyful of crackers!
“This is what I love best about you, girl. You are not picking problems, you do not care, you walk in a Light that is not the sun.”
I do?
“…and there’s a God and He loves you, loves me. My entire life I hate Him, but He never leaves. Never. Nah….Yem! ” She says that for ‘yes’ occasionally, it’s her unusual upbringing; I will never know where she totally grew up in. She sounds like ghettos sometimes- raw, dismembered, and then she is a fountain of healing.
Today for some reason I’m the cause of her healing? I said / did nothing, but the woman isn’t listening. At 80+ she’s earned that right. She talks about her dead sis like she’s there in the next room, then she turns into the Psalmist.
I promise to finish her painting as soons I get more time between comforting Kitsy our second daughter whose Crayfish ate up her beloved Molly– I didn’t dare tell her ‘I told you so’,
Oh but I did tell her,
that, and our youngest fantastic blind 21 year old declaring hatred for his walking cane-
yes, must paint Sia. She is the color of an earth poised to smile: the blood in her runs deep as a river that never forgets. Did her sister really not love her? I’ll never know – Alzheimer’s is a deadly treasure trove.
Though, it makes Sia all the more a mystery to peer through – at a world aching for rest.
“Blood doesn’t matter …” Is a sentence laced heavy with truth. I know at least 2 adopted human beings whose love is not enarmoured by genetics.
Weaving my way back home between Bipolar auto rickshaws and pre- monsoon showers pelting the sidewalk, I can’t help feeling Sia’s feelings. Yem. There’s more that matters, than just blood.
Not the easiest job in the world, ‘momma hood’, but the perks!
I had made an error! Wrote my own name wrong in an important document; let’s spare you the details.In the half hour, we seriously request School Admin to bear the burden of an errant momma’s mistake, oh no I couldn’t do the Legal route, I’ve never even seen a Judge, like in a court room, help. They finally look me in the eye with compassion, I could hug the lady but she’s wearing the steel armor of School Admins, though with a tender smile that says this document is a School leaving certificate and will need endorsement by the State, so. I can’t imagine anyone more powered than the young lady in powder blue sari and curled bun at neck nape. She could run for Prime Minister; I’d have melted by now at a momma’s misery, though she’s right y’know. Mercy & justice meet and kiss as I finally exhale: they are going to “see what they can do.”
Yessssss’m. Hadn’t I prayed just this morning, and hadn’t the God of Moses Himself told me this was a Red sea, but it could part at the power of prayer? Did I have the faith of even a mustard seed? Maybe. Maybe a hundredth of a mustard seed, a shrunk one!
As we leave school campus, there are teachers and bus driver who chat with Kitsy; School Principal is an angel, National Treasure I’m telling you. They didn’t want to send me away with a big No, they were kind.
When last had an Academic Institution spent that much time explaining a tangle?
Yea or nay, Judge, no Judge, whatever route this takes, I love these people who felt my heart pulse in my ears.
Hmm, things like this still make me turn into undiluted pulp. Like when their school socks, or shirt had a stain; when homework was not done, a lunch box missing, ugh, bus pass misplaced, a text book lost.
Old familiar feelings run through me, like lost sheep returning home. These were / are simpler troubles compared to the monsters staring us down this day and age: neighbor nukes, pandies( pandemics), bills in parliament… Ouch prices of this and that.
I’m resting, enjoying the panic of years that gently eased themselves out of our schedules: early morning frenzy between kitchen and front door, ribbons, badges, dog eared books and excited kids running back home with news they had to spill before properly getting off the bus…
Kitsy and I head back home as she exhales, “Oh Ma!”
Two words she uses on a whole variety of occasions; today it is wreathed in a peace I so admire in her. She’s a strong girl; where’d these kids learn to be so composed and calm while I’m swinging off the earth in great big arcs?!
we grin without words, at the way I am, then discuss how being a mom (and daughter) is being a mountain mid valley, a desert in an oasis and vice versa, a river, a drought, an ocean, an island, a forest, a volcano and a mighty rain fall all in one.
We have momos, a bowl of Thai soup.
“Ma, my treat,” she says. What can I say.
It is so early I can hear my heart
Pre-dawns do that. It wakes you up to beauty and quiet, rest and hope.
Have a day of peace and joy, yea we are that privileged.
Reflections
Thoughts on a new May day! No pun intended😅 have a blessed day. Did this for our online fellowship – church, and personally startled all over again by the massive arm of God’s Love that leaves none out.
Pieces of God
Her eyes sparkle then dim as he walks out and leaves her to pay their bill. I didn’t dare take a pic while they were there.
Next to us a couple (late 30s?)….her eager smile full of pink lipstick; his laughter, …careless? The Cafe reeks of a few worlds the names of which I try find, they’re there in my sensitivities.
Another couple exchange photographs in their mobiles, then he stares long at his phone; she beams at him, waiting, then looks at me. Her paper thin cheeks crease in a smile that reveals one broken tooth, was I imagining that? What do I know except that we are pieces of a Life too complex to understand just yet and yet, aren’t we each fantastically full of pieces with or without God.
I ask our eldest daughrer Vi, why Cafes draw me so hard and she grins back, “Oh its stories…ma?” Hmm,
this is real, raw; they unmask certain some unseen things?
One solitary diner talks into laptop, two humans across the long low roofed cafe huddle in peppered ponytails and bright colors, a couple with resting faces burrow into gaudy salads:
people with words, or none, via a miracle of timing: we have coffee together celebrating a victory, a sadness, Hope…
Outside, before our flyover:
👇🏼
a flower seller insists we buy her 2Roses. Kitsy our second daughter returns one rose to the girl who flares with the indignity of that. The dignity of Humility, oh. She receives her Rs 50/-, not thinking she could’ve priced it a bit more; didn’t dare offer her another note, her jaw defies pity?! This is new in my country of a billion contrasts and every contrast falling in me like a psalm;
like pieces of God brewing our attention to detail: perhaps we have misunderstood a few events between here and heaven? Perhaps what we call pain and suffering are truly Bridges into God raw real, screaming for Peace with man….
“Joy?”
I get a forward on “Feeling Joy no matter what” and I’m thinking “Nice!” but the weather is neat pools of red mud where they’re digging up new roads around our address. Yes, the rains give us poetry too, if you’re like me when we aren’t reading on bombings at Borders and what Price Gurus are saying in our Newspaper dropped off at shoe rack outside. Yes yes, an Indian- Must-have (shoe rack outside door) has come in handy after the Virus! All this, but Joy: not trending Reel – 30second replay of Insta-joy, but an “underground river” the forward implied.
Ummm.
So. I’m backing into every overload of goodness the Lord ceaselessly forwards our way:
am doing what I can to true and serious Follow Him so His Updates happen on my Homepage asap. Serious …
without those Notifications I’m stewing bad news bits or Reels of puppies falling asleep & local Funny people (even Jordindians, a few ‘Jalals’ – they’re not all courteous)😏
But Joy – that’s the real deal. Not pieces of this and that, but the Act of the Psalmist hisself, tripping via my Times, raking in spadesful* of Green Pastures with Him Who alone can Unblock the Light.
* spadesful, or spadefuls?
& this is a Draft I’m posting unedited. Is Joy optional? I think so. We never add it on as a Must-have, only because it is a commodity not available off the shelf, unless we Follow the One Who made us all,
He’d have it in loads. Anyone Who created our puppies and furry friends would. Oh I hear at least three of my friends hoot at that.
Whatever it is we follow, will follow us wherever we are headed.
I’m looking at the aspect of Joy.
🌿🕊⛓️🌿⛓️🕊
Re-generate!
Is it even a horse? Maybe not. Inspired by
***
C.S.Lewis’ ‘Winged Horse‘, re-wiring the way I look at Renewals:
worn out earth route replaced by sky map – wings; brain fatigue, taken on by new oxygen!
Who said anything against that, Bro, take a walk in the direction of newnesses. “Racham” Love beyond Love. I found that in a Hebrew Translation of the Love of God, beyond parallel. Love like that speaks to worn out sinews of humanity; to its war-birthed monsters of chaos. Ay, Racham, a Love that breathes into my empty spaces that would other wise fill with death.
Have a blessed day, may Christ meet you totally.
Listen closer to the Cross
D’you hear It’s Whisper ?
Woman
Not just raised as suns:
if you were sat in a chair in a room with closed door, your light spilt out Thresholds.
You did school, college & scrabble: got triple scores & blanks, double dares and heart break in crosswords where you
wrote Lyrics of Peace
✨
Nah, you were/ are not only as sons.
You, He calls “… Pillars of the palace”*.
There will be bows of white satin & war,
there will be love and dances and chances
to seek treasure in Pain; uh games of gain,
of songs in Gethsemane Gardens *
where the Root of you~ will blossom o’ernight, as Lilies *
✨
Suns might fall in the sea but Woman, you
were summoned to breathe by the breath of God :
from the womb of the crust of the dust of stars:
lest you forget you are first born
Natives of The Light. of Lights.
Lest you forget.
***
Innerdialects.
” daughters as pillars of the Palace ..”(psalm 144:12)
Hosea 14 :5:
“I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily. Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots;his young shoots will grow. His splendor will be like an olive tree, his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.
Gethsemane (/ɡɛθˈsɛməni/)[1] is a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem where, according to the four Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus underwent the agony in the garden and was arrested the night before his crucifixion. It is a place of great resonance in Christianity. There are several small olive groves in church property, all adjacent to each other and identified with biblical Gethsemane.
Prayer Ballad
Stoked by Prayer Requests from the Ukraine and our very own home fires. Dearest Lord is Your kindv Love impossible in these times?
The Greatest Love
Nothing stares me in the face like this Reading; today and always but esp today, wishing you the Greatest Love ever🌷It commits us to a whole different kind of strength (read below)
“commit” (thank you FMWriters)
The strength to not strike back, hate. The strength to love in the face of indifference, “…hold on to that for which Christ laid hold of us…”
‘Go to the ant thou sluggard,’ He said
At the Pet Sanctuary we met Hedgehog with soulful eyes (tattoos belong to Guide).
of a Single Hand that meshes all Species in one stroke.
🌿
Every piece of Light and Thought, all War & Crime,
Evil itself reflects what it opposes. Violence turns our eye on Peace, Hate drives hard a case on Love, Disbelief singularily champions a running away from Belief 👉🏼in the very Thing all Creation points to.
When we go out into a universe full of Footprints of the Unknown,
It stares us in the face – this Oneness written into all Living Features:
patterns of Interaction, of Bonding or not, of Phonetic / other Exchanges between the bars of Cages and Pens
things we are not prepared for, things that happen when a rabbit and turkey, gosling or rescued pony meet your whisper, with a sound that can only be described as the Language of Creation~
in syllables that connect us all in one shared Room called Planet Earth;
each of us with unique fingerprints and more ‘unique’ we haven’t even begun to know,
🌷🦓🦗🍂
every eye and tongue of us flora, fauna and homo sapien: inimitable, no matter the sophistication of stem cell theories and other.
The older I get the more gawk-eyed I am, about how little we care about where we’re headed after we leave all this-
that world beyond what human iris can now see,
“I lay hold of that for which Christ laid hold of me...” Philippians 3:12.
Hello 2022!
Life jackets on!
Gratitude
&
Peace❗
Sure I’m holding onto our technically ‘blind’ son with +++ challenges from seizure meds, but grhhjhj, we thinks Mr.Boy particularly enjoyed this manic driver. The man had kind eyes, we trusted him. We told him our Dad had worked that Lighthouse decades ago. We were kin and kith with beach folk, right- but trust is a redefinition all by itself. Kind eyes loved the squeals of us Mice at his mercy, it was his friendly joy to trip our moment left right and centre.
Looking back…It was good. We did decibels we didn’t know were in us. Then we met God in a whole new way there at sea. This is how Storms felt, well – almost. This is what it looked like to be afraid, what it sounded like, felt like….yeah often with the devil himself apparently at the helm, but all the fear was in our heads. What could happen if we tipped over wee too much y’know…
with that horizon tipping 180 degrees this way and that. Um Life jackets. That was re – assuring – firm and braced around the heart. And now safe back home I can’t resist the Q:
What’s my Life Jacket as we go another Trip around the sun together?
🌾(Something we put together yesterday for tomorrow 👇🏼)
Innerdialects 
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